Then they were both crying, Manon and the baby. The midwives saw them and ignored them. This was not under-funding or being short-staffed. This was a culture of contempt.
‘I’m sorry,’ Manon said to the baby. ‘It’s all right.’ Up and down the corridors, until a midwife said, ‘You’re not allowed to walk here.’
At discharge the next day, a kinder midwife (it was a low bar) said, ‘He’s hungry.’ Manon had been told – by whom? The hippy manual or an NHS leaflet – that bottle-feeding was the enemy of breastfeeding. So the midwife fed the baby from a cup.
Back at home, she and Mark panicked. The baby and Manon proved an incompetent duo when it came to breastfeeding. Every time he went on the breast, he fell asleep. One ineffectual pinched-mouth suck, then lapse. Mark tried to cup feed him formula, but most of it went down his vest.
At her home check, ten days after the birth, the health visitor weighed the baby and called an ambulance. ‘He’s lost too much weight,’ she said. ‘I’m re-admitting you.’ She gave Manon a form to hand in to the hospital. On it was written, ‘Mother not feeding properly.’
In the hospital, the baby was whisked away to an incubator, a tube in his nose through which was poured pale yellow formula milk. Manon looked at her baby, wanting to hold him, worried the tube must’ve hurt going in, but she felt relief.
The nurses gathered around Manon’s bed. You need to pump every two hours so your milk comes in, they said.
She pumped. She slept for maybe one hour forty minutes. It was as if the moment she nodded off, the alarm went off again. This was how they tortured people. She wanted to shout, ‘Fine, I give in. No more!’ Frrrr-pah, frrrr-pah went the pump. She wanted to shout, ‘I don’t care about the baby!’ She’d give anything to sleep. No baby, just frrrr-pah, frrrr-pah and her eyelids closing.
Her milk came in. At home, with the help of a very expensive lactation consultant, she learned to feed the baby. Formula milk wasn’t the end of breastfeeding. Stupid hippies. Stupid leaflets.
‘What are you calling him?’ Mark asked.
‘Errol,’ she said, looking at Mark for a reaction. ‘Because he’s so handsome, like Errol Flynn.’
Mark just kept on unpacking the shopping as if she hadn’t said anything at all.
‘Well?’
‘I would hate to be called Errol,’ he said.
She called the baby Edward. Eddie, Ted, Teddy Bradshaw.
In the numb, sleep-deprived early weeks, she thought the world would stop to give her time. She neglected to renew her tax disc and was fined. She cried on the phone to the DVLA, saying, ‘But I’ve just had a baby, I can’t even get to the chemist! I make a cup of tea and forget to drink it!’
Wasn’t there leeway for stuff like this? Did the world expect her to keep up with admin and bills and look after Eddie?
How was this possible?
After a time it dawned on her that the world was full of catastrophically exhausted people on the borders of normal function – offices laden with zombie-parents who hadn’t slept in years, never mind weeks; cars being driven by ravaged adults with barely enough energy to find their shoes.
The shock of this was immense: she must accept a new status quo more exhausting than she thought possible. She started to fantasise about retirement and being old. Going on a cruise maybe. Looking out to sea with a blanket over her knees and an all-you-can-eat buffet to look forward to.
July
Davy
‘So, been enjoying your time off?’ he asks, surveying the dishevelment of the room: every surface covered in bits of white material (muslims, she tells him, but he doesn’t know what the religious significance is). Baby bottles, baby bottle lids, dummies, toys, fabric books, teething rings, seemingly wet baby vests draped over the ends of the sofa.
She’s really let herself go. The room smells slightly of sour milk.
She hasn’t even offered him a drink.
‘Time off? Are you having a fucking laugh?’ she says.
‘Well, no time sheets, no on-call.’ He imagines she’s been wandering about the park a lot in the summer sunshine. It’s been lovely weather this last week.
‘No sleep, Davy. You have no idea. This is round the clock.’
He is horrified to see her lift her top, unclip something on her bra and lob a tit out right in front of him. It bobs downwards like an escaping jellyfish, eddying with blue veins. The nipple is dark and enormous. He doesn’t know where to look.
‘It’s a boob, Davy, not a bomb.’
‘No, right, course.’
She’s changed, he thinks. She’s already told him all sorts of things he feels are not really fit for polite conversation: how it’s a good job she’s still wearing pads because every time she sneezes she does a little wee; about her bleeding nipples; the giant, reinforced caesarean pants she wants to wear forever. It’s as if all her indignities have flopped out as well.
Yet he finds it impossible not to look. Edward’s face is engulfed by bosom – it looms over him like a planet eclipsing a small, bright star. The baby opens his mouth wide, closes his eyes and embraces the breast with arms wide as if he couldn’t be happier to be smothered. While he feeds, his little fist pumps Manon’s flesh.
‘He’s lovely,’ Davy says at last.
Manon exhales, shifting her position so she can relax. ‘How are you anyhow? Still disillusioned? What’s going to happen about Stanton?’
‘The force are not minded to take it to professional standards, seeing as he’s dead.’
‘Ah,’ she says.
He nods, then shrugs sadly.
She says, ‘You know this about the police, Davy. We’re a defensive organisation. In the face of criticism, our main aim is to cover our tracks.’ She puts her little finger into the corner of Edward’s mouth to break his suction-hold and adjusts her sitting position. Just as the baby is about to wail, a look of utter panic on his face, Manon clamps him back on.
‘You look sad,’ Manon says to Davy.
‘Actually, I’ve started speed dating.’
‘Ooh goody, now the shoe’s on the other foot. You always looked down on me for this kind of thing.’
‘Yeah, well, turns out being single isn’t that easy to get out of.’
‘Tell me about it. Go on then – depressing, was it?’
The experience had left him both ashamed and wildly hopeful. He’d looked at all the people in Commemoration Hall, lifting their white parcel labels off the trestle table and sticking them onto their chests, and he’d felt about as much spark as he did on public transport. People’s faces were interesting: sad often, sagging, noble, exotic. But above all they were strangers.
Plastic chair after plastic chair and he’d felt nothing. Then he sat in front of a woman with a conker brown bob and a fringe, very straight and shiny. She was wearing thick-framed glasses, in fact she rather reminded him of Velma from Scooby-Doo, and she told him she was taking a whole new approach to dating conversations.
‘Instead of saying, “This is weird, isn’t it?” or “I’ve never done this sort of thing before, have you?” I’m going through the alphabet; so have you ever been to Texas?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘have you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Asked the last guy how he felt about salt.’